Philippe Boxho, the Belgian medical examiner turned publishing phenomenon – Technologist

LETTER FROM BENELUX

In the small office he keeps at the former Institut Médico-Légal in Liège, Dr Philippe Boxho, 59, searched for Polaroid photos of his first professional experience: One fall morning, on a Walloon freeway, a motorist had been decapitated after hitting a guardrail, and an expert assessment was ordered. That was 33 years ago. Since then, the coroner, by his own calculation, has carried out some 3,000 autopsies.

In 2021, Boxho pulled some of the strangest, craziest and sometimes saddest cases he’d ever come across from his files. To an editor who asked him to publish a book, he initially replied “I can’t write,” before changing his mind. Today, he moves, astounds and horrifies with his short stories, all forensically true but anonymized so that the cases cannot be identified. “I didn’t invent anything, because reality speaks for itself,” he said. “The human imagination is free when it comes to killing, committing suicide or making a body disappear.”

The medical examiner, criminologist, university professor and president of the board of the University Hospital of Liège has become a publishing phenomenon in Belgium, France and Switzerland. His first two books, published by Kennes, Les Morts Ont La Parole (“The Dead Have Their Say”) in 2022 and Entretien Avec un Cadavre (“Interview With a Corpse”) in 2023, have sold some 400,000 copies. Three hundred thousand copies of the third, La Mort en Face (“Death in the Face”), have been printed and some 30 translations are planned. On Tuesday, August 20, the day of the book’s release, 1,000 people lined up in Charleroi from midnight to 6:30 am for a signing session.

The farmer devoured by pigs

The man who wanted to commit suicide but had to try 14 times because his arms were too short to pull the trigger on his rifle; the farm girl who was handed over by her husband to pigs who devoured her; the walker whose throat was slit by the blade of a lawnmower thrown out at high speed when it hit a stone: These are just some of the “craziest” episodes – that’s the term he uses – experienced by Boxho. There are many more in his books, complete with detailed medical explanations and precise descriptions of certain autopsies. The first book was accompanied by a jokey warning: “Sensitive souls abstain.” It’s useful for those who fear details on the use of the plaster saw, the putrefaction of corpses or the role of flies in dating a death.

The author and his publisher were initially aiming for a maximum of 5,000 sales. “The success was not preceded by any prospecting, and proves that market research is useless,” said Dimitri Kennes. How can we explain it, then? “Philippe Boxho responds to the desire to learn about death, and at the same time, he says a lot about life. He tells true stories, with rigor, erudition and also the necessary dose of humor,” said the publisher. “Let’s laugh at death before it smiles on us” is the Liège professor’s favorite maxim. He has also adopted the motto of Dédé d’Anvers, a pimp who, in the 1980s, summed up the main causes of crime in his own way: “The ass or the shield.” “It does explain 95% of murders,” said Boxho.

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